Blog 13 - From a Villa in Grey Lynn - The School Holidays

On day one of the school holidays, I threw off my cloak of invisibility and became a superhero, a guardian of two living treasures flown up from Wellington by their father, Charley. The younger of these treasures will be 5 in December and will finally be old enough to wear a bag tag around her wrist, announcing she is an “unaccompanied minor.” This dubious title will save Charley from flying back and forth like a lost godwit.

From the moment they press my doorbell a hundred times at 7 am and say the password ‘Mootu,’ it’s game on. Two little dolphins somersaulting in the ocean of life with old lifeguard Mootu, nurturing these little buds of promise.

We go to the art gallery. I walk in the door and two security men tell me I have to carry my backpack like a bag, in my hand, not a pack on my back. I am reminded of the air hostesses always finding fault with me no matter how hard I try; window shade down or my bag peeping guiltily out from under the seat in front.

I take Jettie and Cici to the school holiday craft program at the City Art Gallery where the mainly Chinese mothers beam at the concentration of their progeny who are producing art more beautiful than the new exhibitions in the gallery.

Heads with no faces made of the inside of old mattresses stare silently at a machine called “AI existentialism,” which spits out reams of paper with the words “I think therefore I am,” changing one letter every 60 seconds. Three small squares of lit up emojis hang opposite this installation, watching its every move, alternating between boredom, happiness, and sadness.

A plain stand holds a message saying I am alive. A car with a silent movie playing in the windscreen sits alone in a room with its door open, tempting us to sit inside and watch other people’s lives until we too become just like the heads with no faces.

There is an installation of bricks with a hole in the middle. Jettie steps over the bricks into the hole and gets told off by the guards protecting the Emperor’s new clothes.

We go into another room where there is a huge spider, a spinning top hat, and a dog, all made of spongy stuff. There are some children jumping on these art pieces. We don’t want to get told off again so we ask, “Can we jump in here?”

“Yes!”

So, you can jump on some works of art but not others.

There is a huge picture on the wall that you scratch with a spoon. So you can deface some pictures but not touch others.

We walk down to High Street past two homeless men who are sleeping by a water installation which is constantly producing bath bubbles. Cici grabs me by the hand, “Mootu, Mootu, look at his nose!” A huge pimple is coming out of one nostril. They point to the frothy water and say, “The men can have a bath there when they wake up.”

These two men sleeping by the frothing water could be works of art: they simply have to be picked up and put in the gallery, so could the spilt ice-cream at the bus stop. Everywhere we look there are works of art; the gallery, the arbiter of culture, has told us so.

In a eureka moment, I am ready to listen to the words the tongue on my shoes is saying to me:

Art is truth.

Cici and Jettie